First question is are these two bags of Maine Woods pellets the same pellet in a different bag or a different product?
My guess is same pellet different bag but I don't know that for sure. I typically buy pellets by the week at Home Depot or Wal Mart and I usually buy the bag on the left. With the pellet supply shortage this year I decided to stop playing the I hope home depot has pellets today game and ordered a ton from my local EBS who said they had just gotten in a trailer load of Maine Woods, and they showed up as the bag on the right. My last few bags of the left picture I started getting signs of a lazy flame and black glass and it was almost time for a deep cleaning so I did one -- I do one every 3-4 weeks and consists of vacuuming out the interior, taking off the heat exchangers and vacuuming inside, banging on the back wall to release anything else, running a pellet brush thru the vent, vacuuming out the vent, and finishing off with the leaf blower trick. I'm running an Englander 10-cpm btw. When I started using the bag on the right the problem got worse. I assumed I missed something in cleaning and repeated. Problem persisted so I decided to try turning up the air to see if that would help with combustion -- had the bottom buttons on factory set 1-4-1. Switched to 1-4-3 first to see if increasing the AOT would help break up the ash in the burnpot since I've read that it makes the stirrer run faster. Then went to 1-5-3, 1-6-3, and finally 1-7-3 last night - which seemed to help a little but not much. When I turn the stove on around 4pm till I go to bed around 10 pm the flame is very happy and dancing around. When I get up around 5 am the glass is black and the flame is lazier - here is what my glass and burnpot looked like this morning after being on about 14 hours -
I'm starting to wonder if it's the pellets themselves - wonder if they had a lot of bark or moisture in this batch or ? Would it be ok to keep cranking up the air - or is that going to just send more heat out the vent ? Any thoughts/comments greatly appreciated.
My guess is same pellet different bag but I don't know that for sure. I typically buy pellets by the week at Home Depot or Wal Mart and I usually buy the bag on the left. With the pellet supply shortage this year I decided to stop playing the I hope home depot has pellets today game and ordered a ton from my local EBS who said they had just gotten in a trailer load of Maine Woods, and they showed up as the bag on the right. My last few bags of the left picture I started getting signs of a lazy flame and black glass and it was almost time for a deep cleaning so I did one -- I do one every 3-4 weeks and consists of vacuuming out the interior, taking off the heat exchangers and vacuuming inside, banging on the back wall to release anything else, running a pellet brush thru the vent, vacuuming out the vent, and finishing off with the leaf blower trick. I'm running an Englander 10-cpm btw. When I started using the bag on the right the problem got worse. I assumed I missed something in cleaning and repeated. Problem persisted so I decided to try turning up the air to see if that would help with combustion -- had the bottom buttons on factory set 1-4-1. Switched to 1-4-3 first to see if increasing the AOT would help break up the ash in the burnpot since I've read that it makes the stirrer run faster. Then went to 1-5-3, 1-6-3, and finally 1-7-3 last night - which seemed to help a little but not much. When I turn the stove on around 4pm till I go to bed around 10 pm the flame is very happy and dancing around. When I get up around 5 am the glass is black and the flame is lazier - here is what my glass and burnpot looked like this morning after being on about 14 hours -
I'm starting to wonder if it's the pellets themselves - wonder if they had a lot of bark or moisture in this batch or ? Would it be ok to keep cranking up the air - or is that going to just send more heat out the vent ? Any thoughts/comments greatly appreciated.